Founder death spiral

Rookie founders ship a marketing site, then forget about it. I was guilty of that.

That's the problem Ploy solves. A well designed site doesn't grow your business. Ploy turns it into an engine that does.

It's built by Bryant Chou, Webflow's co-founder and founding CTO, who spent 12 years watching companies ship beautiful sites that never moved the funnel.

What that looks like in practice:

You can plug this in and delete that open growth role :)

BDE readers get a special perk on their first month, check it out.

Being a founder is pretty ass backwards sometimes. Most people choose jobs where they get to work on projects they enjoy. And when that work is no longer fun, they leave.

Being a founder flips that upside down. You don’t really get to choose what you work on. Instead, it’s usually the most painful and difficult problems, week after week. A never-ending queue of firefighting and making the worst parts of the company better.

Cue the Elon quote about eating glass.

It’s not always fun. In fact, it’s usually not. But that’s sort of in the job description... and I know what I signed up for.

Lately, though, I’ve grown to love it. Give me the hardest, crunchiest problem and let me get after it. I’d much rather this reality than the one I was flirting with before.

Let me explain…

Last year I had 18 direct reports and spent way too much of my time in meetings. I was miserable. Worse — I saw plenty of problems across the business but was too busy managing people to do anything about them myself.

I hear from a lot of founders who accidentally built a business they no longer enjoy being part of. The thrill of the early days is gone, and they spend their time following the conventional wisdom: hire managers, delegate, lead more meetings, scale the team, etc.

I call this the founder death spiral (or at least, I’m calling it that as of 3 seconds ago).

It’s basically the opposite of founder mode: work becomes a slog, your calendar is full of bullshit, you’ve over-delegated, you’re three layers removed from the action, and you’ve lost control of your baby to the machine.

But it’s critical not to follow the same path as everyone else just for the sake of it. Excuse me while I somewhat obnoxiously use the F-word: first principles.

How’s this for first principles? beehiiv is more likely to succeed when I’m happiest and able to contribute what I do best to the company.

It’s that simple.

I’ve been traveling way too much. I’ve taken six cross-country flights to and from New York over the past six weeks. Important meetings, panels, fireside chats, keynotes, etc. All the things some founders dream of when they’re just starting out. Recognition!!!

Not me. I think I’m pretty good at it, but it’s not the most productive use of my time.

My happy place is in my office (ie my room), headphones in, cracked out listening to BDE (the playlist), and getting shit done. I’m a builder. That’s what’s gotten us here, and that’s what’s going to take us to the next level.

As I’ve matured as a founder (and person), I’ve taken stock of what gives me energy in life vs. what takes it away. I love to build (vibe coding legit might be my favorite hobby). Activities like hot yoga, surfing, and tennis all give me energy. It’s like injecting a shot of life right into my veins.

And the things that drain my energy: meetings, flights, presentations, travel, networking, etc. Not only do they take away my energy, they take me away from the things I enjoy and think are more productive for the business. Honestly, just rereading that first sentence makes me want to get sucked out of a Boeing 737.

Anyway, I saw myself dancing with the founder death spiral and I wanted out. If you’re willing to do the hard things and make the difficult decisions, you can fight the conventional wisdom and do it your way.

So earlier this year I shed 10 of my direct reports, shook up the team, reinforced focus days on Tuesdays and Thursdays (the best), and took back control of the company and my day-to-day. There’s still some work to do on protecting my time (re: travel), but there were some meetings in New York I couldn’t afford to miss.

Plus, peep how great Kara Swisher, Don Lemon, and I look on a panel together.

When people ask where I spend my time today, it’s impossible to answer. It changes every week. Every day, really.

Now that I’ve taken back control of my calendar, I can tackle the biggest, most pressing problems across the company. And AI has made it so much more fun and achievable, even when the underlying problems are the least fun and highest stress to work on.

Here’s an example. Last quarter, we saw an uptick in advertisers complaining about lower-quality clicks in the ad network. Email is a beast — firewalls and security software generate a ton of bot clicks across the ecosystem. And as a global platform, we unfortunately deal with malicious users in developing countries who try to abuse the ad network (generating $3 per click is a damn good gig in Bangladesh).

We had a system in place to catch and prevent fraudulent clicks — it just wasn’t working super well. So I spent two weeks obsessing over the problem: building dashboards and alerts in Claude, running deep analysis to identify patterns, and holding daily meetings with our security teams.

In those two weeks, we identified and removed a subset of users abusing the network, built new automated processes to catch fraud in real time, and entirely eliminated the problem.

My real superpower as CEO: I can’t get fired. I came in guns blazing to solve this problem. I didn’t care who was responsible for what or how to politically approach it without hurting people’s feelings. I just wanted it solved, and I was going to push forward and annoy everyone involved until it was.

I take that superpower seriously. I’m sure others on the team had ideas on how to address the issue. But maybe it wasn’t technically their job, or they didn’t want to overstep or piss off another team.

It’s not that I’m a dick (I’m not), but we’re a startup. We don’t have time to tiptoe around and hope we make progress before it’s time to sign off for the day. When something becomes my focus — it’s going to get done with urgency.

Right now I’m shifting my focus toward growth and marketing. The internet is evolving, and the strategies that worked before just aren’t cutting it anymore. Gone are the days when you could rely on SEO, lead magnets, and paid social.

We’ve been evolving at beehiiv too, just not fast or intensely enough. We aren’t taking enough big swings, we aren’t on the cutting edge, we aren’t cracked enough.

Where we are cracked is product and engineering. I can confidently say beehiiv is the best and most powerful platform in the industry. Even those who churn tell us that on the way out (legit).

And we aren’t slowing down either. Our Q4 roadmap is absurd. We’re shipping powerful new email capabilities, dynamic podcast ads, and video (!!). We also brought on a new Head of Sales for the Ad Network and are cooking on some massive new logos and campaigns (launching soon).

There’s a lot more coming that I won’t spoil right now…

Incredible product and good marketing have gotten us to $35M ARR. We’re on pace for nearly $50M in revenue in year five.

But continued product excellence and absolutely cracked marketing are what’s going to get us to $100M ARR.

We’re looking for a few people who see that as a challenge and want to build. If you’re reading this and think you could bring novel growth ideas to beehiiv and a work ethic that would make Elon jealous… drop me a reply.

This is my top priority right now and I won’t sleep until we nail it. Come join the rebels and help us redefine the creator economy ⚡

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